News this week that the price of rail season tickets will rise by at least 4.1% next year was accompanied by understandable complaints from passengers, campaign groups and politicians.

Another above-inflation fare hike is being imposed at a time when wages, if you're not a bonus-laden City worker, are rising at 1.1% per year. That contrast is stark enough to justify the outcry.

But this is a perennial debate that often goes no further than a series of attacks from passengers and a stream of rebuttals from franchise owners, who levy fares on commuters.

Meanwhile the government, which has set the cap on fare increases at the RPI rate of inflation plus 1%, is reduced to voicing hopes that above-inflation ticket hikes will end after the next election. Unless the British economy tips into deflation, that is unlikely to happen.

If the debate is reduced to a trio of voices – the passenger, the government and the train operator – then it will be doomed to perpetual circularity at best, which is a dangerous position with another round of spending cuts at the Department for Transport post-2016.

The former chairman of Network Rail, Rick Haythornthwaite, was right to warn the industry a few years ago that the public views it with "confusion, suspicion or disdain".

This argument needs to be held on broader terms, perhaps those laid down by the late historian Tony Judt: "The railways were and remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit.

"They cannot exist without common accord (and, in recent times, common expenditure), and by design they offer a practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike."

If the public believes that the railways are the preserve of the south-east and the middle class, and bring no wider economic benefit, then perhaps there are grounds for reducing state funding of the railways even further.

Currently, fares account for 58% of industry funding, compared with the government's 32%. Without a wider debate about the social and economic role of rail – not just the impact on the individual farepayer – then that 58% figure will rise inexorably.